We're failing because we didn't own one of the most important communication innovations that has happened in our lifetimes: the growth of social media.

Brands try to sell themselves all day long on their social media channels, oftentimes with very little success. They’re saying things like, “Check out this pizza, now eat it;” “Look at my building, now come spend your money;” and “Hey, we posted 100 times today and for some reason, it did nothing to our
Facebook reach.”

That’s becausewe're all failing.

For years, I have tried to make one point very clear: People sell brands. I can give a million examples of things we bought because of the people behind them – including whatever device you are using to read this column. You either bought that phone, computer or tablet because your friend had one, someone wrote a review about it, or someone sold it to you. See the one thing all of these scenarios have in common? A brand didn’t sell it to you, a person did.

But when it comes to social, we seem to have forgotten this. We have largely forgotten about crowdsourcing for ideas, using our customers as our brand celebrities, leveraging the human interest stories within our brand to connect to an audience, and using social media as a social tool.

Agencies and brands still claim that they are listening. But are we? Are we simply using some automated program that magically tells us what people are saying? Or are we actually joining the conversation?

Here’s the answer: We have failed to join the conversation. We have failed to go to this amazing party called social media. And then we failed to adapt when Facebook decided that they could charge us and our clients a ton of money to reach the fans we had so desperately fought to secure.